Exclusive interview: New Cal State Long Beach President Jane Close Conoley and her ‘relentless’ style

SANTA BARBARA >> Jane Close Conoley waded through nearly 200 emails Wednesday. More on Thursday. Her inbox had 127 more on Friday morning.

The congratulations poured in for Conoley, who last week was appointed by trustees for the California State University system as the seventh — and first female — president of Cal State Long Beach.

“I can’t wait to meet the faculty and the staff and the students,” said Conoley, who plans to start in July. “I’ve gotten over a hundred emails already from campus people welcoming me and look forward to some great face-to-face interaction real soon.”

From her Santa Barbara home, tucked between the 101 Freeway and the Pacific Ocean with a view of the Channel Islands, Conoley, the 66-year-old dean of the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UC Santa Barbara, reflected on a lifetime in education and the journey from her working-class Irish Catholic home in the Bronx to the campus proud 49ers call “The Beach.”

She recalled how her father, Thomas Close, a meter reader supervisor who worked at Con Edison for 49 years, used to take the family on Sunday drives through Manhattan and the Bowery section, considered then as the New York version of Skid Row.

“He used to say, ‘If you don’t work hard, this is where you’ll end up,’” Conoley said.

‘You think that?’

The granddaughter of Irish immigrants, Conoley grew up with two older brothers and a twin sister named Joan. Like her father, Conoley’s mother, Marie Close, barely had an elementary education. She worked as a bookkeeper on Wall Street during the Great Depression.

They raised a physicist and a New York City police officer in their two boys. Joan became a teacher and principal, working with low-income and immigrant students.

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“They were very smart people,” Conoley said of her parents. “The thing about them was that they didn’t have much formal education themselves, but they were great believers in it and encouraged us, and actually held us to very high standards.”

That meant education in Roman Catholic schools. Conoley attended the Academy of Mount St. Ursula, an all-girls college preparatory school. Her teachers wouldn’t accept anything less than excellence, with one, Mother Winnifred, telling Conoley she would fix her “substandard Bronx dialect.”

She and Joan attended the College of New Rochelle, the first Roman Catholic women’s college in New York state, also run by the Order of the Ursulines.

The sisters were able to attend the elite private school on scholarships donated to the Ursulines. Their scholarships didn’t pay for room and board, so the sisters drove their father’s American-made sedan to the campus, where Conoley said she first experienced people of means.

“I got this pretty world-class education because other people cared,” she said.

They were transformative years for Conoley. The counterculture was in full swing with the open embrace of illicit drugs, the sexual revolution, anti-establishment protests, a new wave of feminism and widespread opposition to the Vietnam War among young people.

Conoley learned philosophy under a Benedictine monk. The Ursuline nuns, following the conviction of their religious beliefs, opposed the war. Her teachers were progressives and instilled in her a duty to serve people. Conoley decided to major in psychology, with the goal of working with special education students.

Her Irish Catholic parents, whom Conoley described as unquestioning when it came to matters of God and country, were shaken by the cultural unrest of the 1960s. Conoley’s evolving beliefs didn’t go unnoticed in the home.

“Many times my mother would say, ‘I sent you to a Catholic school and you think that?’ ” Conoley said.

Being a woman leader

After college, Conoley, who had married her high school sweetheart at 21, took jobs teaching elementary school students, including stints at an all-black elementary school near Warner Robins, Ga., and Latino students in a Roman Catholic elementary school in San Antonio, Texas.

“Through those experiences, I realized I was certainly committed to education, but I also saw the kind of individual baggage these kids brought — mainly poverty and certainly ethnic discrimination,” Conoley said. “I started to think what I really wanted to do was go back into psychology.”

Divorced by that time, she enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin, where she met Collie Conoley, who was a year ahead of her in his studies and whom she would marry in 1976. She felt a growing desire to instill mental health programs in schools, teaching educators how to work with students facing abuse, poverty and a host of other obstacles to learning.

She and Collie Conoley would take turns deciding where to live, based on whether one wanted to move for a job change. Jane Close Conoley had first pick and took a job as an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Syracuse. She said she was the second woman ever hired in the department. Her husband directed a community mental health center in the area.

At Syracuse, Conoley said she was placed on various search committees to bring a female perspective. She didn’t take it as a compliment. Instead, Conoley published an article titled “The Token Ineffectual: A Woman in Academia.” Once, while talking with a female graduate student, Conoley said a male professor walked by and asked what they were discussing, because “it couldn’t be that important.”

Conoley said she carried the burden of expectations that she would be a university representative of women, a task she could do without. Sure, she’s the first female president at CSULB, joining three other female presidents in the 23-campus CSU system, but she doesn’t indulge questions about the meaning of women in leadership.

She stayed at Syracuse for three years before her husband decided they would move to Denton, Texas. He taught psychology at the University of North Texas. Conoley took a job as associate professor in the Psychology Department at Texas Woman’s University. They stayed five years before Conoley was recruited by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

At Nebraska, Conoley taught psychology and edited the prestigious Mental Measurements Yearbook, a gold standard textual review. She became a full professor in 1988 and was immediately asked to become department chair, meaning she would be one of two women to hold such a position in the 100-department university. Conoley also was associate dean for research at Nebraska’s Teachers College from 1989 to 1994.

Conoley was then recruited to become dean of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University in College Station. She was the only female dean on campus in 1996, she said.

‘Effective and efficient’

Douglas Palmer headed the Department of Educational Psychology when Conoley arrived on campus. Speaking by phone from Texas, Palmer said Conoley later asked him if he’d be interested in becoming the executive associate dean of the College of Education and Human Development.

Now the dean of that department, Palmer said he was cautious, because he likes to be the one in charge. But he found Conoley to be an effective leader.

“I trusted her implicitly,” Palmer said. “She’s an individual who really works well with the leadership team. She delegates authority and allows people to assume responsibility. She is really willing to take on difficult decisions.”

Palmer said those difficult decisions included restructuring departments while leading faculty and staff through the changes.

“Within the college she was very effective at managing that,” Palmer said. “That can be a very tense issue for faculty and staff, but it was managed very well. She marshalled the involvement of all of these people and was very effective and really very thoughtful. She is very committed to communication in a variety of different forms. I think that ability is a hallmark of her commitment, to being engaged in shared governance and transparent with various groups. She gathered lots of information and made decisions that were effective and efficient for this one small department.”

During her time at Texas A&M, Conoley knew Robert Gates, who was the former director of the CIA. Gates served as interim dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M from 1999 to 2001. He served as president of the university from August 2002 to December 2006, before resigning to become the U.S. Secretary of Defense under former President George W. Bush.

“He was a fabulous leader and really taught me the value of figuring out a strategic approach to problems that kept as many people as possible on board,” Conoley said.

Conoley said one of the best examples of Gates’ leadership strategy was when he developed a plan to recruit more Latino and black students to the university. He couched the effort in terms of bringing in more “first-generation” students, which appealed to many older alumni, many of whom were the first in their families to go to college, Conoley said.

The linguistic maneuver made Gates’ message resonate with older Aggies, who otherwise would never have donated money for the purpose of attracting minority students to the university, Conoley said.

“But of course, most of the first-generation students were black and Latino, and he used the $8 million he raised to go into black and Latino high schools,” Conoley said. “He increased in one year by 35 percent the number of underprivileged students, and he did that without creating any pushback from the alums. And they would have pushed back if they thought it was racially based admissions.”

Since 2006, Conoley has been dean at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UC Santa Barbara, as well as a professor of counseling, clinical and school psychology. Collie Conoley is a psychology professor at Santa Barbara. They have three adult children and five grandchildren.

‘You have to connect’

Conoley said when she arrived, the school of education was isolated from the campus and community when it came to collaboration. She immediately visited superintendents in surrounding school districts.

Now in place is a countywide council on STEM learning — science, technology, engineering and math. The school of education is now collaborating on research initiatives with 28 other departments on campus and has a research partnerships with several countries, including Singapore, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and Australia.

“I believe to be great you have to connect with business, with other universities, with elected officials, with the area of K-12 and community colleges,” Conoley said. “You just can’t do it alone.”

Conoley has also navigated her school through the economic storm that was the Great Recession. In 2006-07 she hired eight faculty. She hasn’t been able to do more hiring since but expects the school to add faculty in the coming year.

California’s budget crisis meant faculty and staff who left the school of education weren’t replaced. Conoley steered the school through furloughs, a dearth in lecturer hires, and retirement incentives — all means to save money and minimize impacts on students.

“The last thing to be cut would be faculty programs,” she said.

All the while, the school of education was turning out between 80 and 100 teachers a year, she said.

UC Riverside

And universities were not finished recruiting Conoley. UC Riverside came calling, and she served as acting chancellor there for about seven months, replacing Timothy P. White in December 2012 when he assumed the CSU chancellor position. UCSB appointed an acting dean during her time at UCR.

Conoley has served as chair for several UC system committees. Aimee Dorr, provost and executive vice president of UC, was among those who interviewed Conoley for the post in Riverside.

Dorr couldn’t be reached by phone but said in an email that Conoley is a gifted scholar and administrator with whom she’s had the honor and pleasure to work for many years.

“She is absolutely terrific and we will miss her terribly at the University of California,” Dorr said. “She will be the first woman to lead Cal State Long Beach, and I’m confident she will soon become known as among the best leaders that institution has ever had.”

At UCR, Conoley worked with legislators in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., as well as alumni scattered throughout the country, to secure $15 million in annual funding for its new School of Medicine.

James Grant, assistant vice chancellor for strategic communications at UCR, said in her seven months at the university, Conoley impressed with her ability to understand the complexities of a large campus and respond to the needs of faculty, students and staff.

“She worked very diligently to secure that funding, and everyone is so grateful for that as part of her lasting legacy,” Grant said.

The velvet hammer

Conoley’s time at UCR gave her access to movers and shakers that delivered funding to the university. Conoley met with lawmakers at the local, state and federal level who opened their doors.

Her lobbying efforts hearken back to those of F. King Alexander, CSULB’s sixth president, who left last June to become president of the Louisiana State University system and chancellor of Louisiana State University A&M.

But while Alexander was known for his high energy, Conoley’s style appears to be methodical, leaning on her experience in psychology. According to her recollection, she hasn’t raised her voice at work in 15 years.

“My style is to be relentless,” she said. “In other places people have said, ‘you’re like a velvet hammer.’ I’m not an in-your-face person. I always come prepared with data. And then I don’t give up. I’m pretty fearless in interpersonal situations. I’ll talk to the government and keep going back.”

On campus, Conoley said leadership should be less command and control and more influence and motivation. The first key to success at CSULB will be to find the programs that are working well and grow them, Conoley said, recalling a psychology adage that one should catch others being good.

As for those caught not being good, Conoley, ever the numbers person, will look at the data. Student success is her top priority, and hard data reveal what’s working and what is not, she said.

‘Very data driven’

“I intend to focus on our strengths and show people that when they are striving to be successful they will get support,” she said. “I don’t spend a lot of time on people who won’t work. Life’s too short. I am very data driven. I like the big Excel sheets, and I like to see graduation rates and what are the admission standards and what are the outcomes. I don’t care so much about entering GPA, but I can care about the job opportunities (after college) and what do we know about alums. So there might be some faculty who might be uncomfortable with that.”

Conoley aims to re-energize CSULB’s comprehensive campaign to raise funding from donors and foundations, which she said has been in a silent phase for too long. She wants to accelerate local initiatives on college preparedness at the K-12 level.

Another core commitment is to faculty and staff morale. Conoley said it’s important for CSULB to attract and retain high-quality personnel. She just wrapped up a retention case in Santa Barbara, convincing a faculty member to stay instead of taking more money and prestige at UC Berkeley. The key was fostering an environment where the work of faculty and staff are valued, Conoley said.

Conoley also is a strong supporter of the humanities, even as university and government officials throughout the country seek to increase STEM learning. It’s a push that has some humanities professors concerned about funding cuts to their departments. Conoley pointed out that Gates, her former boss at Texas A&M, earned his doctorate in Russian and Soviet history.

Universities are curators of man’s collected knowledge, Conoley said. Producing graduates ready to contribute to the economy is important, but so is sending young people into the world who better the lives of their fellow citizens, she said. In speeches to students, Conoley often tells them they should always do three things — vote, accept jury calls and support public education.

“I think it’s incumbent on us to do a better job of explaining how we add to the economic success of the state, but also the aesthetic and the moral and the civic success,” Conoley said.